The night flew by, and to our surprise we found 240 miles had slipped away and we were in Bayonne. Thirty minutes more and we were speeding south, and soon crossed the Bidassoa, the boundary between France and Spain. Then my wife saying, "Now I will sleep," laid her head on the shoulder of the happiest man in or out of Spain, and in ten minutes her regular breathing told me she was in the land of dreams.
The Pyrenees, in dividing France and Spain, stand between two distinct peoples, and as the centuries go by the streams of national life meet, but only to repel each other, never to mingle. One has but to cross the bank to realize that he is among a different race. Dress, food and cooking—social life, religious devotion, modes of thought—are all different. To us here in America it is difficult to realize that so slight a thing as a mountain barrier, easily traversed, crossed by many defiles and good roads, should continue to separate two distinct peoples. But so it is. Stranger still, for nearly all time the inhabitants of the Spanish mountains have been more or less opposed to the people of the Spanish plains, and every century has seen several insurrections among the mountaineers. In 1872 and '73 the Carlists held the mountains and more or less fusillading was going on. The possibility of my way being blocked by the Carlists never entered into my calculations.
The railway from Bayonne to Madrid is owned in Paris, and it seems that the directors were paying blackmail to Don Carlos, ostensibly to him, but really to several marauding bands who plundered under the name of fighting for the Don, upon the understanding that the railroad was not to be meddled with. The directors had been paying 100,000 francs a month. As will be easily believed, there was a difficulty in the distribution of the money among so many greedy and inartistic robbers, and the discontented determined to hold up the railroad itself and stop all trains. Unluckily, the train we were on was the one they proposed to experiment on first, and they proposed drastic measures, too—in fact, had blown up or down a short tunnel, and torn up the rails in front of our train. As we crossed the frontier a French gendarme and Spanish civil guard appeared, demanding passports. It was, of course, a sure thing that I had them all right. It is a safeguard under the protection of which the man who has anything to fear slips through the fingers of frontier guards and police, while the honest man quite frequently neglects the necessary formalities and is detained.
Our train crossed the bridge over the Bidassoa and we were on Spanish soil. Soon we entered the gorges of the Pyrenees, and while speculating whether I should awaken my wife to see the magnificent scenery all necessity for awakening any one on that train was over. Three or four musket shots rang out, our train was off the rail, and after a crash or two came to a sudden stop, and then a babel arose, while the train was surrounded by armed men. It was laughable. It seemed like an opera bouffe, the real thing, this motley array of brigands, all trying to maintain under difficulties the grave Spanish exterior.
One monkey of 18 or 19 years, armed, came to our compartment, and, pointing to my chain, said he wanted it and my watch. None of us understood Spanish, but we all comprehended his meaning readily. I refused to make him a gift, and got rid of him easily.
We were all ordered to alight and our captors seemed inclined to be ugly. Myself and party were about the only well-dressed people on the train, and, seeing a priest close by, I went up to him, and ascertaining he could speak French, I began, in very bad French indeed, to threaten with very dire consequences Don Carlos and every band of Carlists who dares to annoy an English Duke and Duchess, and demanded instant shelter and a guard for my wife, the Duchess. We could hardly keep from laughing, it was so very like a melodrama. My wife thoroughly enjoyed the situation, and I should have done so too, had I not had such strong reasons for quick passage through Spain to blue water on the South, for I desired to speedily put some leagues of Neptune's domain between myself and the Old World.
The priest, although a sallow, sombre fellow, was a very good one, and seemed to realize the gravity of the situation, for, calling the chief to him, he warned him to be careful. That gentleman came up, and drawing himself up said very proudly: "Sir, we are soldiers, not robbers." I said I was very glad to know it, and demanded to be informed if I was a prisoner or not, and was told I was not, but with the same breath he said he would be obliged to detain us for a few days. There was a fonda, or inn, close by, and leaving my wife there, I finally managed by a liberal use of money to secure an ox-cart, and by virtue of great generalship on the part of myself and servant, got all our baggage out of the wrecked train and safely up to the inn.
Spaniards are provokingly slow, but by riding mule-back five miles away I succeeded in seeing the local commander of the Carlist forces, and he promised to send me the next day a pass through the lines, going either south or north. I got him also to include in the pass my fellow passengers. I did this because there was a Portuguese family who had tickets for South America. They were then on their way to embark at Lisbon, and the old gentleman, the head of the family, was very weak and ill.
My safe plan would have been to return to France, make my way to Brest and embark from there to New York, and that would have been my course had I had any conception of the slowness of the Spanish officials and of the fierce storms and snows that dominate the passes of the Pyrenees in Winter.
We were informed by many officials, railway guards, Custom House officers, Carlists, etc., that by crossing thirty miles south we would pass the lines and get to a little town on the railway where trains left frequently for Madrid. The Spaniards about the place would never have let us start out on that perilous trip had it not been for the money there was in it. I had secured at a round price three century old bullock carts, and in the afternoon of the second day we got off. I had all the women and the sick Portuguese in one cart, with the two other carts ahead heaped with luggage. Thus there were eight bullocks, four mules and (unlucky number) thirteen men engaged.